A traffic demand (such as a Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) signal or a stream of packets) of an optical ring may have a bandwidth requirement that is less than the channel capacity of the ring. Accordingly, multiple traffic demands can be aggregated into a ring to improve bandwidth utilization efficiency.
An optical line card has an add-drop-multiplexer that can aggregate multiple traffic demands. A demand utilizes a pair of optical line cards, one at the source node and the other at the destination node of the demand. Sharing these optical line cards with other demands may reduce the total number of optical line cards used.